« Freeze Now, Or Forever Fall to Pieces | Home | How to Look Good »

Friday Blog Meat: All Your Symptom Are Belong to Us

By MALE PATTERN FITNESS | March 30, 2007

In the 15 years I've been writing about health and fitness, I've seen my share of nutritional panaceas rise and fall. Right now, vitamins are down, especially antioxidant vitamins. But back in the mid-'90s, when I started, they looked like the solution to everything.

Today, the anti-antioxidant backlash is in full swing; rarely is heard an encouraging word. My doctor asked me what vitamins I supplements I use during my last checkup, and scolded me for including vitamin E on the list. (I confess I stopped taking it after that.)

So it's remarkable, in the midst of this backlash, to read that antioxidant supplements might be good for something after all:


In a study published recently in Free Radical Biology and Medicine, University of Michigan scientists appear to have found a dietary approach to reducing noise-related hearing loss.


They fed five groups of guinea pigs vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, magnesium or a cocktail of all four nutrients, then exposed the unfortunate rodents to five straight hours of jet-level noise. Those in the cocktail group had better hearing afterwards.


The researchers think the compounds worked synergistically to absorb free radicals before they'd done damage, and expect to start testing an ear-saving dietary supplement within two years.


Okay, it's an animal study, has limited application, and appears to be linked to a profit motive on the part of whoever patents and produces this new supplement. But it is one small step back to respectability for a downtrodden nutritional wonderkind.


Green ... with envy


Green tea is the cutest girl at the panacea ball these days, with a new study showing it might actually help fight HIV. But is it all too good to be true? That's the question Jonathan Brown asks in The Independent:


In Britain, sales of green tea have been growing at the rate of 25 per cent a year, fuelled in no small part by the celebrity endorsements of stars such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez. ...


[N]ot everyone is convinced by the many health claims. Professor Mike Williamson of Sheffield University, whose laboratory tests this week suggested that epigallocatechin, a component of green tea, could reduce the risk of contracting HIV by coating immune cells, is unconvinced.


"There is a lot of rubbish talked about what green tea does and most of it I don't believe," he said. "I think a lot of claims have been exaggerated and the main way they have been exaggerated is that they have used far too much green tea. This can amount to several hundred cups a day -- something that presents its own toxicity risk. If you throw enough green tea at something you can show any effect you like," he said.


According to Professor Williamson, whose own study suggested benefits could be gained from drinking two to three cups a day, there is at least one other exciting area of research. Green tea has been found to have the ability to "switch off" stomach cancer cells, something which could one day inform a treatment, he said.


Dr Philip Coan, a physiologist at the University of Cambridge, is if anything even more skeptical. He argues that there has yet to be a sufficiently large study conducted outside the laboratory with the correct controls to establish green tea as a bona fide medicine. "People tend to believe that there are cures for things in simple old remedies but there really is no scientific basis for this," he said.


Smells like yet another backlash brewing.


The omega code


Which brings me to fish oil, the alpha-dog panacea. Will it, too, travel the familiar path to Backlash City? If it does, it probably won't be anytime soon. Fish oil, for the moment, still has legs, according to a recent Japanese study.

The study looked at whether fish oil, in addition to statins, would help prevent people from having heart attacks. The sample size was huge -- 18,600 adults with high cholesterol, 3,660 of whom had established heart disease -- although the duration, four and a half years, seems kind of short.

Two keys:

1. Everyone in the study was taking statins.

2. Half the people took a purified form of EPA, one of the omega-3 fats in fish oil. So it wasn't the stuff you get by the jug at Sam's Club.

As for the results, they sound good until you look at the details:


During the study, the vast majority of patients had no major heart problems. However, 2.8 percent of those taking EPA along with statins experienced a major coronary event, compared with 3.5 percent of those only taking statins.


That's a 19 percent difference, note the researchers, who included Mitsuhiro Yokoyama, MD, of Kobe University in Kobe, Japan.


EPA pills weren't linked to any difference in fatal heart attacks or sudden cardiac death.


When Yokoyama's team took a closer look at the data, they found the EPA advantage only applied to patients with a known history of coronary artery disease.


Patients with high cholesterol but no history of coronary artery disease may also get some heart protection from EPA, but that's not certain, since so few of them had major heart problems during the study.


So if you have diagnosed heart disease, a purified form of one of the fats found in fish oil might help, when used in conjunction with statins. That's a pretty tepid finding, but I guess it's better than a backlash.

Personally, I'm still waiting for the study showing that Diet Coke prevents ... well, I'd settle for anything. Paper cuts? Good enough.

Topics: Uncategorized |

Comments

« Freeze Now, Or Forever Fall to Pieces | Home | How to Look Good »